Design Support For A Green IoT


By Dirk Mayer and Roland Jancke The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly all around the world. New devices are continually being added, all collecting a variety of data and transmitting them (often wirelessly) to edge devices, which in turn relay the data to the cloud for further processing. It is estimated that in a few years IoT devices will be responsible for over 20% of global ene... » read more

The Many Flavors Of UPF: Which Is Right For Your Design?


Energy efficient electronic systems require sophisticated power management architectures that present difficult low-power verification challenges. Accellera introduced the Unified Power Format (UPF) standard in 2007 to help engineers deal with these complex issues. To keep pace with the growing complexity of low-power designs, the UPF standard has itself continued to evolve through the relea... » read more

Modeling PCBs For Common Causes Of Failure


By Theresa Duncan and Michael Blattau When designing printed circuit boards (PCBs), keep in mind the major causes of electronic failure: thermal cycling, vibration, and mechanical shock and drop. You can perform a variety of physical tests to determine how and why electronics fail, however, a much faster and cost-effective solution is PCB modeling and simulation. When simulation is used i... » read more

CXL: Sorting Out The Interconnect Soup


In the webinar Hidden Signals: Memory and Interconnect Decisions for AI, IoT and 5G, Shane Rau of IDC and Rambus Fellow Steven Woo discussed how interconnects were a critical enabling technology for future computing platforms. One of the major complications was the “interconnect soup” of numerous and divergent interface protocols. The Compute Express Link (CXL) standard offers to sort out m... » read more

Certification And Collaboration Key To Closing IoT Security-Perception Gap


When it comes to security today, there’s perception and then there’s cold, hard reality. Here’s the reality: Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15% per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, which is triple the 2015 figure. To get a sense for how pervasive the problem is, Symantec set up a “honeypot” system that dete... » read more

Know Your Own Power, Early And Accurately


By Taruna Reddy and Vin Liao Chip designers have always had to balance timing and area. Everyone wants a design as fast as possible and as compact as possible, but these two goals are usually in conflict. For the last couple of decades, minimal power consumption has been a third goal, often of equal importance. Some of the biggest drivers for the semiconductor industry are battery operated p... » read more

A New Way To Create Structures


Let’s focus today on an established routing technology with a new twist! All of you are doubtless familiar with the concept of structures – formerly called via structures, renamed to structures because of their growing flexibility and application across many flows. These handy, reusable blocks of routing allow you to quickly fan out the most complex of component interfaces. And, after that,... » read more

Achieving Physical Reliability Of Electronics With Digital Design


By John Parry and G.A. (Wendy) Luiten With today’s powerful computational resources, digital design is increasingly used earlier in the design cycle to predict zero-hour nominal performance and to assess reliability. The methodology presented in this article uses a combination of simulation and testing to assess design performance, providing more reliability and increased productivity. ... » read more

Five Key Changes Coming With DDR5 DIMMs


On July 14th of last year, JEDEC announced the publication of the DDR5 SDRAM standard. This signaled the nearing industry transition to DDR5 server dual-inline memory modules (DIMM). DDR5 memory brings a number of key enhancements that will bring great performance and power benefits in next generation servers. Scaling Data Rates to 6.4 Gb/s You can never have enough memory bandwidth, and DD... » read more

Is Computing Facing An Energy Crisis?


Is the end near? If the topic is energy efficiency gains in computing, the answer depends on whom you ask. The steady increase in performance per watt over the decades has been one of the most important drivers in our industry. Last year I was thumbing through a neighbor’s 1967 Motorola IC catalog that featured such space age wonders as a small control chip of the sort that went into th... » read more

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